by Erin Evans
“We’re well under treefall aren’t we?” Bodhar asked.
“Not yet,” Dahl said. There was time still and options. He hoped.
“She knows your spell works both ways. She knows you didn’t tell yon cuckoo that.”
“Handing out new names,” Thost sniffed. “I’d ask who he thinks he is, but that’s apparent.”
“D’you think he could be? A god, I mean.”
“Don’t be daft.”
“How’s that daft?” Bodhar demanded. “We just fled a godsbedamned demon lord. Did you forget that?”
“Not a god.” Thost looked to Dahl as if expecting agreement, but Dahl could only shrug.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Nothing’s making sense these days. It wouldn’t be out of place.”
“Were he a god,” Thost said, “I think we’d know it.”
Dahl would have agreed. But then Gilgeam spoke the common tongue despite there being no way Gilgeam could have lived on Toril. He healed Mira when they said there were no gods on Abeir—and so no gods he could draw such gifts from—and magic was even more difficult to grasp there than on Toril.
“You planning on signing up for the priesthood?” Dahl asked. “Because if not, the only thing that matters is he’s trouble. We need to get around him, not try and go through him.” He cast his gaze out at the encampment. “If he’s headed for Unthalass, we’ll be close enough to Djerad Kethendi to make a run for it.”
Again, the brush rustled, but the wind didn’t make it down to where they sat. Too much noise for too little breeze. Dahl glanced toward the camp again.
Bodhar rubbed his arms. “Stlarning cold.”
“I gotta piss,” Dahl said, standing. Without waiting for his brothers to reply, he walked out to the edge of his tether, eyeing the green-gray brush. As he came to a stop, he gave a low, looping whistle. Nothing. He tried it again.
“Black Hound and Green Sister!” a voice whispered. “What’s that supposed to be? A drunk barn swallow?”
“Volibar?”
“You don’t need to sound so surprised.” The halfling poked his head out from behind a brush. “Where’s Mira?”
“You’ve got to get out of here,” Dahl said quickly. “Stay as far from this camp as you can—the leader’s mad, he’s got demons and more than enough followers, he hates nonhumans, and he’s not too keen on humans if they don’t come from Unther.”
“Naed,” Volibar swore. “So you’re just planning to rot here?”
“No, but I know when I need reinforcements,” Dahl said. “Get to Djerad Thymar. Cross the river and—”
“I know how to get to godsdamned Djerad Thymar.”
“Get yourself to the Verthisathurgiesh clan,” Dahl said. “Ask to talk to Farideh, or if not her, then a fellow named Mehen.”
“She’s the one who’s got Haslam.”
“Yes, damn it, just … Tell them what I told you. They’ll listen. Tell them he’s heading for the ruins of Unthalass, and don’t forget the stlarning demons. The dragonborn have to be ready.”
“Aye aye. Don’t get yourselves killed,” Volibar added as he slipped off into the night.
Dahl straightened and made a show of rearranging his clothes, trying to calculate the likelihood of the halfling’s success. Volibar was faster than any of them in this terrain, slipperier than even the shadowy demons. But the army stretched out, farther than he could see. They’d need another plan.
As he approached the tether’s anchor and his brothers though, he saw Namshita had returned with a pair of young men doling out bowls of some sort of porridge. Her dark eyes were locked on Dahl, as if she’d seen every moment of his subterfuge.
“Fill your bellies,” she said, not breaking her gaze. “Tomorrow we march.”
Behind her, more soldiers came, flanked by the dark shapes of winged women—succubi, Dahl thought, avoiding their gleaming eyes. Between them trudged a line of dragonborn, their faces pierced with swinging silver chains and small copper owls. Old and young and hardy—not an army, but a family. A few families. The remains of a few families, Dahl thought.
And the latest slaves of the Son of Victory, Dahl thought, as they too were yoked to spikes driven into the ground.
• • •
BRIN CONSIDERED THE diagram sketched above the location spell once more—how in every broken plane he was meant to balance the owl’s feather like that he couldn’t imagine, but the instructions saw no need to elaborate. The book hadn’t been written for dabblers after all. With the point of the fineknife he’d used to trim it, he shifted the feather a finger’s width down the iron bar, where it toppled, floating down to the empty basin below.
“I thought you said you knew how to do this,” Mot demanded.
Brin ignored the imp hovering just past his shoulder. Of course he’d said it—Bryseis Kakistos would only keep him close so long as she thought he could help her. At the very least, he needed this apparatus to look plausibly functional, even if his chances of making the spell work were small.
Not small, he thought. Nonexistent, unless you figure out what it is you’re trying to find.
Mot dropped lower, nearly landing on his shoulder. “You have no shitting idea what you’re doing, do you?”
“So far as you know,” Brin replied, trying to balance the feather once more, “I’ve done this every day of my life. So you can’t tell her anything different, unless you want to risk being wrong.”
Mot was silent and scowling a long moment. “The witch? If she asks, I have to tell her how long you’ve been messing with that feather. If she doesn’t ask …” The imp shrugged. “If she doesn’t ask, then it doesn’t matter. You don’t know how to do this, do you?”
“What about Bosh?” Brin asked, eyes on the feather.
“Turn around.”
Brin glanced back over his shoulder. Beyond the glowering Mot, Bosh was examining the glass panes of the window with a curled nostril, as if he had never seen anything so out of place. “In the time it takes Bosh to tell the witch a damned thing,” Mot said, “she’ll turn him to ash faster than she did Olla. I’ve never known anybody who could be so stupid about such pointless things in so many words. You don’t know what you’re doing. How, by the Nine, do you survive without her?”
The feather drifted down again, and Brin balled his hands into fists and blew out a breath that caught it and sent it spinning. “I’m trying.”
Mot snatched the feather. “Try harder.”
“Are you going to try to convince me you care about Havi?” Brin asked. “Because I’m not buying that cow.”
Mot folded his little arms across his chest. “Look, when you’re an imp, you get a lot of orders. I happened to like her as an order. She says thank you. Also,” he added a little defensively, “maybe Dembo got the axe for helping, but I got the credit for the hellhound idea. Might get promoted for it. Maybe I’ll be a spinagon.”
Brin frowned. “You want that?”
“Of course I want that! Everybody wants a promotion.”
“But you won’t be you anymore, will you?” Brin said. “The imp’s destroyed.”
Mot looked at him as if he were being deliberately obtuse. “No, I’ll be me, but I’ll be Spinagon Me. Who cares if the imp’s destroyed? But I’m not getting promoted for serving the Brimstone Angel, even if it’s in my orders. Have you figured out what you’re supposed to find yet?”
He hadn’t, but he’d pieced a few clues together: Bryseis Kakistos hadn’t asked about “it,” until she’d possessed Havilar—that moment where Havilar’s expression had gone blank, as if the ghost were searching through the borrowed memories of this body. Havilar must have known, and she hadn’t told Brin.
Brin considered the scrying equipment. What wouldn’t Havilar have told him?
The list was short. Havilar didn’t keep secrets, not from Brin.
Arjhani, he thought. She hadn’t told him the story of Arjhani, the story of the winter night where she’d nearly died trying to right
a wrong that wasn’t hers. And she hadn’t told him about being the Chosen of Asmodeus, or about the power that made her sick around demons.
But in all those cases, she’d told him on her own, as soon as it brushed his own life, even though she clearly wanted to keep it secret. She wasn’t the sort to hide something important.
“It’s something Havilar knew about,” he said. “It’s something she’s … embarrassed about or worried about, probably. And Bryseis Kakistos wants it badly enough to set me after it.” He twirled the owl’s feather between his fingers. “Which narrows it almost none at all. Do you know of anything Havi might have been keeping secret?”
“Lords of the Nine! You’re missing the obvious,” Mot said. He dropped his voice, flying closer to Brin. “She only cares about two things: those heirs and that staff. So if you’re meant to find something, odds are good it’s an heir or a staff.”
Brin blinked. Where is it? Not “he,” not “she.” “It.” Bryseis Kakistos thought he knew where to find the staff of Azuth. Brin shook his head. “The staff. Havilar didn’t … I mean, it wouldn’t have been in her glaive or something. Right?”
Mot gave him a dark look. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure even the crazy ghost witch would have noticed the divine artifact in the room. It must be someplace else.”
And Bryseis Kakistos couldn’t find it on her own, which meant there must be some sort of trick to it. A trick Havilar didn’t know well enough for Bryseis Kakistos to pluck out of her mind. A trick she thought Brin could figure out.
“Stay here,” Brin said.
He wound his way through the cold fortress until he found one of the black-boned skeletons dusting a sculpture of a demonic vulture in flight. The skeleton gestured with an arm decorated in silver wire, staring at Brin with blue cabochons for eyes, which distorted his reflection: Bryseis Kakistos was down in the dungeons. The lowest level of the fortress still hung high over the valleys of the Snowflake Mountains. As he descended, he passed narrow windows that let in icy gusts off the farther peaks, glimpsed in the distance through the gathering storm.
The stairs came down into the middle of a corridor, and he heard Havilar’s voice off to the left. As he neared the source, Bryseis Kakistos’s tones rang through, and he found that even though he knew he ought to expect the difference by now, it still took his breath away.
“If you cannot give me a different name,” she was saying, “then you’ll have to remain here.”
“I don’t know any others!” the woman shouted. “Do you think we’re such a close-knit family? We flee each other—we know that much.” Brin stopped before the closed door.
“Then I suppose you’ll have to do,” Bryseis Kakistos said politely. “Someone will be by with food later. You ought to eat while you can.”
The door swung open and Brin stepped back out of the way, glancing inside as unobtrusively as he could. A woman with a tangle of red hair around her horns glared at him as the door shut. Bryseis Kakistos locked it with a heavy key. She smiled at him. “And how are you getting along?”
“Well enough, saer.”
She waved that away. “That’s not necessary. We’re all but family.” She started down the corridor, not waiting for Brin. He hurried to catch up with her. “Any luck?”
“There are protections in place, it seemed,” he said. “I was wondering if you had any notion of how to elude them.”
She clucked her tongue. “I’d assumed you placed them. What a tragedy. Ah well, try the usual avenues. You may need to use blood, although it won’t be as potent.”
Whose blood? Brin wanted to ask, but he held his tongue. “Thank you.”
“At least you understand the …” She drifted to a stop, her words trailing away. Brin stood beside her as Havilar’s face, still and unexpressive, stared straight down the corridor.
“Havi?” he whispered.
She blinked, but then it was Bryseis Kakistos and no one else who turned to him. “Where will you settle after this?” she asked as they strolled past the stairs. “I can’t imagine Cormyr is good for … mixed families.”
“Depends on how much coin you have,” Brin said lightly. “We were considering Waterdeep.”
She made a face. “I suppose. I’d manage, of course, but should you have others …”
“Others?”
“Children.” Bryseis Kakistos waved a hand at one of the crystals in the wall. A swirl of magic started a mote of blue light glowing at the crystal’s core. “You should have others. Not too many of course. What do you intend to do for work in Waterdeep?” she asked. “Or will the Crownsilvers fund you?”
Brin blinked. “Um, well, we were discussing buying a caravan company.”
Bryseis Kakistos made another face. “Which will mean you’re away more often than not, or you’re raising your family on the road. That’s hardly ideal. Perhaps you should consider going back to your family. Presumably, with heirs, the troubles you left behind become much more manageable. How much coin are they worth, precisely?”
In his wildest dreams, Brin could not have imagined a stranger discussion: his lover’s great-great-grandmother’s ghost testing his suitability as a husband to her granddaughter and a father for herself. But mad or not, it wasn’t a test he could fail.
“Quite a lot,” he said, “but I wouldn’t … I don’t think it’s the place for a child. To the Crownsilvers, an heir is a tool. I grew up with titles and coin, yes, but no choices of my own, no freedom. My playmates were novices of Torm. I lived in fear of the assassins who killed my father. I had to hide behind a screen during his funeral—I didn’t get to say good-bye, because it was too risky to the Crownsilvers. And when I returned to that world, its ruthlessness infected me. I felt I had no choice but to think of politics and games of succession. I wouldn’t wish that on any child.” Especially not a tiefling child, he thought.
“Your children won’t be you.”
Brin shook his head. “But Suzail will be Suzail. I will be me, and Havilar will …” He faltered. “I hope Havilar will be Havilar. If we have children, I would rather they were paupers with love and safety in their lives than nobles who have to grow poison in their hearts to survive.”
Bryseis Kakistos smiled coldly. “You’ve never been a pauper.”
“A happy medium then.”
She tilted her head, that gesture so like Havilar that Brin’s thoughts reeled a moment, and her smile faded. “I will grant you this, Lord Crownsilver: you have a kind heart. Perhaps that will make some difference—a little kindness right from the start. Or perhaps it would have.”
Brin hesitated. “Did you not know your father?”
She laughed, and once more, every hint of Havilar seemed erased. “The winter,” she said, “was my father. Darmshall’s streets, my mother. You don’t have to do much to improve upon that. Though,” she added, “it remains to be seen if any of it matters at all. I have things to attend to. And so do you.”
Brin headed back up the stairs, feeling that if he hadn’t gained the information he’d sought, at least he’d gotten a little better informed about his enemy. Even if it meant he was starting to feel sorry for Bryseis Kakistos.
4
28 Nightal, the Year of the Nether Mountain Scrolls (1486 DR)
Fifth of the fingerbone towers, Malbolge
The Nine Hells
AN UNFAMILIAR CURL OF PANIC GREW IN LORCAN AS HE STEPPED through the portal into the Nine Hells. A dose of fear was normal—a half-devil wouldn’t live long in Malbolge without being wise enough to fear what lay around each corner. But this was different—this was the kind of terror that got a fellow killed. The kind of terror he knew how to prey on, but not how to master, and it thrummed all through him, as if carried by the faint, unending pulse of Malbolge.
Another sign that things had changed. It couldn’t be permanent, he told himself as his feet settled on the bone-tiled floor. Although, he had no proof of that, no understanding of how far this change extended. Only that it wasn’t right.
Damn you, Dahl, he thought, as he glanced around the narrow room, fighting to keep his breath calm. Once more he wished he’d convinced Farideh to share the protection—but he’d had no choice but to return to the Nine Hells, and the very thought of bringing Farideh here for more than a heartbeat made him feel like nothing but prey.
He noticed the erinyes waiting for him—too late—by the time he registered her standing there, blade in hand, he should have been dead. No god of luck would have dropped a die for Lorcan, but he found himself endlessly grateful it was Neferis waiting for him.
“You’re alive.” She sounded surprised, maybe a little relieved. The last he’d seen Neferis, Glasya had tasked her specially with watching over Lorcan—whether that meant she was to guard him or spy on him, neither of them was sure. “Where’s Zela?”
“She didn’t come back?” Lorcan said. He’d left Zela and eight other erinyes in the Underdark as well, facing off with a clearly diminished but still-dangerous Graz’zt, the Dark Prince. The erinyes should have been able to flee … but Lorcan wouldn’t have laid a wager on whether Zela, the most powerful of his sisters, would have let them.
“Not yet,” Neferis said. She sheathed her sword. “I would have chased you. Her Highness said you have to be alive. But with Zela there …” She let the explanation trail away, leaving Lorcan to decide if Zela had been a safeguard or a deterrent.
The walls oozed a stream of marrow. “If she’s not back yet,” Lorcan said, “does Glasya know they left?”
Neferis shook her head. “The oathbreaker curse gives special permissions through the gates and portals.” She drummed her fingers on her sword hilt. “Where’s Little Sister?”
“Out of reach,” Lorcan said. Until Farideh turned twenty-seven, he was bound to protect Sairché from harm, just as she was bound to protect him. A deal that outlived its usefulness the moment it compelled him to open a portal to the Underdark to save a possessed Sairché from Bryseis Kakistos’s reckless—and failed—plan to ally with Graz’zt. Farideh’s birthday couldn’t come soon enough. “For the moment, anyway. Has Shetai sent anyone looking for me?”
